Monday, September 7, 2015

When the state goes behind parents' backs

Mention abortion and a lot of
people metaphorically block their ears and start humming loudly.

At the very sight of the word
in this column, some readers will probably turn the page and move on. But this
is an issue that refuses to go away.

It was re-ignited last week
when Hillary Kieft of Stratford courageously spoke before a parliamentary select
committee.

Kieft’s daughter, at the age
of 15, was referred for an abortion without her parents’ knowledge. She later
tried to kill herself.

The abortion was arranged by
the daughter’s school. According to her mother, she was given no other option.

That a vulnerable teenager
could be referred for a potentially life-changing and psychologically damaging
operation without parental knowledge seems despicable. It deprived her of
family support when she most needed it.

The defence for keeping
parents in the dark in such situations is that they can’t always be relied on
to support pregnant daughters. Some girls would risk being harshly punished for
bringing disgrace on their family, which is despicable in its own way.

This provides politicians
with a ready-made excuse not to accede to Kieft’s petition for a law change
that would require parents to be notified before girls under the age of 16
could be referred for an abortion.

It seems an extraordinarily
modest request, given that parents are normally assumed to have some control
over what happens to their children. But don’t expect Parliament to act.

Most politicians run a mile from
the abortion debate. Too difficult; too likely to stir up raw emotions.

I expect that the select
committee will gratefully seize any reason for not meddling with the status
quo. The possibility that not all parents might be as loving as Hillary and Peter
Kieft will provide them with all the justification they need.

But that would leave a grave
wrong unremedied. It’s not hard to understand why the Kiefts and others in
their situation feel their rights as parents have been coldly disregarded.

What made matters worse in their
case was that it wasn’t just a passive deception. It appears they were wilfully
misled.

Kieft said that when their
daughter was dropped off after the abortion, she and her husband were told she
had been to a counselling appointment. If that’s true, they were told a
bare-faced lie.

So this is what it has come
to: an agency of the state not only usurping parents’ rights, but trying to
cover it up by lying.

We should expect no more,
because the administration of the abortion law is drenched top to bottom with
dishonesty.

The dishonesty starts with
the pretence that abortions are carried out for the mental health of the
mother. It was officially acknowledged as long ago as 1998 that this is a “pseudo-legal”
justification to get around the fact that otherwise, abortion remains an
offence under the Crimes Act.

If dishonesty can be
practised on such a scale that it’s used to justify 14,000 abortions every
year, it’s easy to see why lying to a schoolgirl’s parents would be considered
no big deal.

The school can always say it
only did what everyone else associated with the carrying out of abortions does.
You might call it top-down dishonesty.

In this case the deceit was
compounded because even when a psychology team was called in to help with their
daughter’s deteriorating mental state, the Kiefts were not told what had
triggered the change in her behaviour.

In other words there was a
conspiracy of silence which involved health professionals too. And in the
meantime the Kiefts were afraid to go to sleep at night for fear that their
daughter might not be alive when they woke up.

Kieft told the select
committee there was no follow-up counselling or medical care for their daughter.
Once the job was done, neither her school nor the Family Planning clinic where
the abortion was carried out showed any further interest.

So much for all the hypocritical
cant about abortionists being primarily concerned for women’s wellbeing.

The acute irony is that a University
of Otago study found in 2008 that women who had had abortions had a 30 per cent
greater risk of developing mental health problems.

No one talks about this.
That’s more dishonesty, right there.

So while abortions are
ostensibly about protecting women’s mental health, they often have precisely
the reverse effect. And so it turned out in the sad case of Kieft’s daughter,
who still takes medication every day to deal with depression. Footnote: A letter in the Dominion Post of September 7, written by Family Planning chief executive Jackie Edmond, says the abortion in question could not have been carried out by a Family Planning clinic because only its Tauranga clinic is licensed to carry out abortions. I accept that that's technically correct. My column was based on information in a Dominion Post story that said the girl was taken to a Family Planning clinic. But the distinction is an academic one. The abortion was arranged by Family Planning, and I find it interesting that the organisation now gives the impression of wanting to distance itself from the case.

6 comments:

I link to the counter piece at Stuff that covers the problems with the point of view you express in your article much better than I can - http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/71802685/forcing-teenagers-to-tell-parents-of-abortions-would-have-dire-results

Other than that I'll note that the the Family Planning Spokesman didn't give me the impression of wanting to distance himself from the case so much as, other than correcting the factual inaccuracies and providing quality general scientific results/information, he had no interest in getting involved in a public dispute with a Blogger with a clear axe to grind on abortion and abortion laws.

Thanks for keeping this issue alive in the public sphere. We talk a good deal about measuring a society by how it treats its most vulnerable, usually in reference to child poverty, yet it seems the most vulnerable place for any child today is in its mothers womb.

I suspect that one of the reasons we are so easily able to embrace the prospect of euthanasia is because we have already placed a 'convenience value' on human life through what is effectively abortion on demand.

The arrogance of the State in over ruling the rights of parents to support and council their child in the event of teenage pregnancy is monstrous in the extreme. To deny the parents this right based upon the presumed negative reactions of a few parents is a despicable and unjust policy.

It's the difference between a journalist writing a factual story about something that has happened and a lobbyist trying to sell a position, especially where they are lobbying against an existing law/situation rather trying to influence an upcoming open-ended decision - "an axe to grind".

In addition your piece is quite clearly, from the terms uses and the cherry picking of an outlier study with poor methodology, an attempt to do a hatchet job on a law you object to. And for all your throwing around of claims of dishonesty of all of the people involved in abortion and the abortion laws you fail to mention that you are a committed long-term opponent of abortion rights.

You have a long standing opinion/objection on the abortion laws this case merely gave you a chance to take that opinion out, grind the edge slightly and express it. - Thus "an axe to grind".

I'm not a lobbyist for anything and never have been. Nor, in this context, am I a "journalist writing a factual story", although I do that quite often, and keep my opinions right out of it. This was a column in which I expressed an opinion. That's what columnists do. If I didn't express my honestly held opinion, I wouldn't be much use as a columnist. If you disagree with me, fine; but don't try to dismiss it as axe-grinding merely because you don't like what I say.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.